Monday, September 17, 2012

$139: new food and used clothes

Grocery spending this week was $250. Why? The husband spent $35 of this at grocery stores getting cereal, ice cream, coffee cream, and sundry. I did a small $17 market run to get milk and yogurt. And there was also a purchase of $197 for 35 pounds of locally harvested turkey kielbasa.

The kielbasa has, by now, been divvied up into many, smaller bags that have gone into in the pillowcases (sorted by month) in my freezer. The bulk (so to speak) of our winter meat purchases are behind us. But watch for the pirate-inspired turkey leg purchases later this week!

At any rate, the most recent grocery expenditures bring our weekly grocery average to $139/week for 26 weeks. 139 is not only a prime number; it's a rare "twin" prime, coming as it does next to its prime sister (137). Nobody knows how many twin primes there are. If you can figure out the answer, you'd be famous forever and earn $1 million. No, really.

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But the fall harvest isn't limited to food. September is a lovely yard sale month in our area. Saturday I tooled around town for an hour and a half with K-daughter. For $8.50, I picked up a variety of things I'm happy to include in the Miser Mom household.

This includes not only a bunch of books (one I hope to read on my next trip, one for the boys, and one to give as a gift), but also some spare lasagna pans (so we can make multiple lasagnes and freeze them) and a photo of Dale Earnhardt that will become a gift for a completely devoted N-son. Also four small cake molds for our halloween dinner and four blue-glass wine bottle stoppers:

And three pairs of long school pants, plus two pairs of short-sleeved school shirts:

Not to mention a school back pack. It originally looked fairly tacky because it came with the logo of a tobacco company on it, but the seam ripper fixed it so that it now looks just fine. N-son has co-opted this.

Plus (not pictured) a reading lamp for J-son. Not a bad haul for a pile of quarters. Although, still no long-sleeved shirts. Sigh.

In the same way that the growing season is producing its last beautiful vegetables right now, the shopping season for household things is going strong but will soon end for me. I'm taking advantage of these cool, beautiful Saturdays of fall. Because as we move into October, we switch from buying fresh food to seeing only canned (or imported food) around us. But the same time, my other shopping options switch from buying used goods (at yard sales) to buying new goods (in stores). Either way it goes, I'd rather buy things in summer.

Miser Mom's Musings

About Me

Miser Mom is a mild-mannered, super-hero-wanna-be mother of [about] 6 children (some still at home and some who've grown up and moved out). By day, she teaches math at a nearby college. Her husband is not a miser.